Film Category

The new biopic about Queen singer Freddie Mercury (5 September 1946 – 24 November 1991), tells us how he met the band and pulled his partner, Jim Hutton. The is much artistic licence. In one sun, Freddie Mercury tells the rest of the band about his HIV. It’s during rehearsals for their hymned 1985 Live Aid appearance. But Mercury wasn’t diagnosed until 1987. The rest of Queen did’t know the full extent of his illness illness until 1989.

He had a very responsible attitude to everyone that he was close to and he was a very generous and caring person to all the people that came through his life and more than that you can’t ask,” said May in 1991. “I tell you we do feel absolutely bound to stick up for him,” added Taylor, “because he can’t stick up for himself anymore, you know?”

Hymned director Martin Scorsese has produced a list of his eleven most terrifying horror movies. There’s nothing after 1983. This might be more down to his age than any decline in the standard of horror. Scorsese was born in late 1942. Maybe when he reached his 40s, he stopped being frightened?

It’s also notable that noticeable that many of the directors whose work impressed him are no longer alive. Robert Wise died in 2005; Vale Lewton (1951); Lewis Allen (2000); Frank de Felitta (2016); Alberto Cavalcanti (1982); Charles Crichton (1999); Basil Dearden (1971); Robert Hamer (1963); Stanley Kubrick (1999); Jacques Turner (1977); Jack Clayton (1995); and Alfred Hitchcock (1980). Perhaps there’s a bit of professional rivalry? Anyhow, the list if great:

Jennifer Lawrence showed some skin as she lined up with her Red Sparrow co-stars for a press call. The men showed no skin. The Mail says the looks sparked “controversy on social media”. Helen Lewis, for one, was upset by what came to be called – get this – “WarmCoatGate”.

This is such a quietly depressing (and revealing) image. Not least because I’ve been outside today and it’s bloody FREEZING. pic.twitter.com/BRnmgKJ5wY

Not that Lewis, the Deputy editor @newstatesman, was outside to promote a film. Some clothes are best for popping to shops, others are good for gardening or climbing Everest. Some are good at getting attention.

The Mail couldn’t resist editorialising, telling readers that Jennifer Lawrence “appears to be shivering in a plunging Versace dress”. You can tell if someone’s shivering from a still? Maybe the cold is why the four man are all sporting coats and beards. Maybe the beards are viewed as part of what it is to be a man, just as Lawrence’s cleavage is essentially feminine?

Lawrence got wind of people voicing their disapproval. “This is not only utterly ridiculous, I am extremely offended,” she writes on Facebook. “That Versace dress was fabulous, you think I’m going to cover that gorgeous dress up with a coat and a scarf? I was outside for 5 minutes. I would have stood in the snow for that dress because I love fashion and that was my choice.”

Get a load of all that freedom. And then get another big stinky load of the righteous trying to work out if you can have freedom and enforced equality.

In other news: attractive actress in revealing dress gets film lots of attention. Read all about it!

Who wants a Pop! figure of a topless Jeff Goldblum? Who doesn’t? Goldblum was shirtless and wounded in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park. And now the “Wounded Dr. Ian Malcolm” love toy is yours to take home.

Do we look at actors pretending to be other people and beings from fact and fiction, and think they should have had their morals checked before getting the part? Moral thinking can change, so if we are going to check people’s minds, we need to review the past in a modern light, too, in case someone impressionable and vulnerable looks at them and copies their lives. You know how it works: you watch Clark Gable and Carole Lombard in No Man of Her Own, realise he’s cheating on his wife with her, pull on a vest, grow a moustache and shag a colleague.

Blessedly, Kevin Spacey, now the subject of sexual abuse allegations, has been removed from the next series of House of Cards, the TV showin which he plays the main character. Variety reports that “producers plan on scrapping most, if not all, of the footage shot during the roughly two weeks of season-six production that had taken place in October”.

You can still catch Spacey on reruns, but perhaps they too will be binned, just as the BBC purged its archives of Jimmy Savile, both real and imagined. Spacey’s accusers have not had their claims tested in court, their allegations not yet made to vault all those hurdles to justice. He says he’s innocent. But lest we be upset by the look and sight of Spacey playing a murderous figure on the telly, he’s been dismissed.

So when Johnny Deppp was cast in JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts, The Crimes of Grindelwald, there were howls of outrage. This is Depp whose then wife Amber Heard accused him of subjecting her to domestic abuse. Depp denied any wrongdoing. The couple divorced. And that was that.

Until that is Deep went to get a job. Rowling, an intelligent woman, told everyone: “Based on our understanding of the circumstances, the filmmakers and I are genuinely happy to have Johnny playing a major character in the movies.”

But some people were dismayed. In what she terms “a post-Weinstein world”, one writer says casting Depp in the show “breaks my heart”. She adds:

The practice of giving men in power the benefit of the doubt simply because other powerful people vouch for them is sometimes known by another name: rape culture.

Well, that escalated quickly. Rape? Depp is presumed innocent, right? And we don’t own him. He’s a private individual. Rowling says just that in her statement:

When Johnny Depp was cast as Grindelwald, I thought he’d be wonderful in the role. However, around the time of filming his cameo in the first movie, stories had appeared in the press that deeply concerned me and everyone most closely involved in the franchise.

Harry Potter fans had legitimate questions and concerns about our choice to continue with Johnny Depp in the role. As David Yates, long-time Potter director, has already said, we naturally considered the possibility of recasting. I understand why some have been confused and angry about why that didn’t happen.

The huge, mutually supportive community that has grown up around Harry Potter is one of the greatest joys of my life. For me personally, the inability to speak openly to fans about this issue has been difficult, frustrating and at times painful. However, the agreements that have been put in place to protect the privacy of two people, both of whom have expressed a desire to get on with their lives, must be respected. Based on our understanding of the circumstances, the filmmakers and I are not only comfortable sticking with our original casting, but genuinely happy to have Johnny playing a major character in the movies.

I’ve loved writing the first two screenplays and I can’t wait for fans to see ‘The Crimes of Grindelwald’. I accept that there will be those who are not satisfied with our choice of actor in the title role. However, conscience isn’t governable by committee. Within the fictional world and outside it, we all have to do what we believe to be the right thing.

How great is that. She gets it. “JK Rowling endorsed Johnny Depp and betrayed millions of women,” laments the Independent, which thinks women are best served by subjecting private lives and relationships between the sexes to forensic scrutiny; equating accusation with guilt; and believing that no-one of whom we have an unfavourable opinion and who is innocent before the eyes of the law should get the job.

Copy and past news now, as the Metro tells us that Kenneth Branagh is starring in a remake of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. On set he was delighted to see fellow star “Michael Pfeiffer“. Any relation to screen goddess Michelle Pfeiffer? Dunno. But the rest of the busy tabloid media also salute the great Michael Pfeiffer:

Daily Express:

Speaking with ITV’s Lorraine, he said: “There was a lot of mutual respect.

“The first time they met on the platform I was on the train watching them all getting ready to come on. They were so sort of shy with each other, it was like the first day at school… Then the first person up the steps was Michael Pfeiffer and she had tears in her eyes and I thought, ‘Christ, we haven’t started and she’s already upset!’ And I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she said, ‘I just met Judi Dench!’”

Daily Mail:

He told Lorraine: ‘There was a lot of mutual respect. The first time they met on the platform I was on the train watching them all getting ready to come on. They were so sort of shy with each other, it was like the first day at school. ‘Then the first person up the steps was Michael Pfeiffer and she had tears in her eyes and I thought: “Christ, we haven’t started and she’s already upset!”

Daily Mirror:

“They were so sort of shy with each other, it was like the first day at school, then the first person up the steps was Michael Pfeiffer and she had tears in her eyes and I thought, ‘Christ, we haven’t started and she’s already upset!’ and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she said, ‘I just met Judi Dench!’”

He added: “Judi Dench is the secret to casting movies basically, you cast her and she’s an actor magnet.”

Dontchaloveshowbiz? At the James Corden-hosted amfAR Gala in Los Angeles, Julia Robert won a gong for…courage. Roberts has done good works in the fight against HIV/AIDS.AmfAR is “dedicated to ending the global AIDS epidemic through innovative research”. All good. But “courage”?

Courage is defined as the “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty”.

Aside from the hyperbolic language, Vanity Fair tells us of the do: “While accepting her award on stage at the sprawling home of billionaire investor Ronald Burkle’s Green Acres Estate in Beverly Hills.”

Courage under crystal in the bijou home ballroom.

And then there was this:

Try not to vomit if you watch this>> Meryl Streep & Hollywood ..Don't You DARE EVER Preach To The Rest Of Us You Sanctimonious Hypocrites pic.twitter.com/lHYJyAE8C0

It’s pretty well known that Swedish dancer an actor Alicia Vikander is part giraffe. In her previous jobs the professional liars (surely ‘Photoshop artistes’? – ed) shorten Vikaner’s neck so as not to alarm household pets and dads.

Happily, for her part as Lara Croft in the latest Tomb Raider spin-off, Warner Bros have left Vikander well alone. And, rather horribly, everyone says she looks weird. Expect to see her mutated again very soon.

Stanton also led his own band, first known as Harry Dean Stanton and the Repo Men and later simply as the Harry Dean Stanton Band, and would play pickup gigs in L.A. area clubs. Bob Dylan, with whom he worked on Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 film “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” was a friend. Another friend was Hunter S. Thompson, and Stanton sang at his funeral.

The character actor was the subject of two documentaries: 2011’s “Harry Dean Stanton: Crossing Mulholland” and Sophie Huber’s 2013 “Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction,” which featured interviews with Wenders, Shepard, Kris Kristofferson, and Lynch.

Well the name came from my husband, he says I am a “loca” [crazy] which I have to admit, I can be a loquita in the best way possible. The brand, however, came because I was throughly mesmerized by these bath and body companies catering to the “goth” style and as much as I love the dark or obscure I didn’t feel like it screamed “ME!’ So, I decided to create bombs that were nostalgic and that I could identify with.

Angelina Jolie has been casting for her film set in Cambodia. The film, First They Killed My Father, features children living under Pol Pot’s murderous regime. According to Evgenia Peretz writing for Vanity Fair, the auditions involved a novel form of mental torture and exploitation. Jolie, a woman with the purchasing power to pluck orphans from slums, slap an ‘X’ on the names and transport them to an American mansion to appreciate the kind of lifestyle a Russian oligarch might find gauche, was looking for the right kind of desperate child:

To cast the children in the film, Jolie looked at orphanages, circuses, and slum schools, specifically seeking children who had experienced hardship. In order to find their lead, to play young Loung Ung, the casting directors set up a game, rather disturbing in its realism: they put money on the table and asked the child to think of something she needed the money for, and then to snatch it away. The director would pretend to catch the child, and the child would have to come up with a lie. “Srey Moch [the girl ultimately chosen for the part] was the only child that stared at the money for a very, very long time,” Jolie says. “When she was forced to give it back, she became overwhelmed with emotion. All these different things came flooding back.” Jolie then tears up. “When she was asked later what the money was for, she said her grandfather had died, and they didn’t have enough money for a nice funeral.”

Presumably all the losers in this ugly contest got an all-expenses paid trip back to the slums from whence they’d came. And what of the local stage school kids who’ve trained to act – because it’s all about pretending, right? Would Jolie pull a similar stunt in the US? Would poor children in Jolie’s native LA be used to make the stinking rich, self-aggrandising narrator’s moralising resonate with purpose and meaning?

Every measure was taken to ensure the safety, comfort and well-being of the children on the film starting from the auditions through production to the present. Parents, guardians, partner NGOs whose job it is to care for children, and medical doctors were always on hand everyday, to ensure everyone had all they needed. And above all to make sure that no one was in any way hurt by participating in the recreation of such a painful part of their country’s history.

I am upset that a pretend exercise in an improvisation, from an actual scene in the film, has been written about as if it was a real scenario. The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting. I would be outraged myself if this had happened.

The point of this film is to bring attention to the horrors children face in war, and to help fight to protect them.

Is grandstanding and ‘raising awareness’ better than coming up with solutions and handing over cash? Jolie’s work is a movie, something she hopes people in her homeland will spend their leisure time and money watching. Celebrity colonialism might well make viewers and fans in rich countries take notice of stuff in poorer places but is there a shred of evidence it changes lives other than those lucky enough to make it on the plane to the land of make believe?

Bilge Ebiri tellsThe Village Voice readersabout the new Transformers movie:

“No matter, because this after all is a Transformers movie, so soon we’re faced with fiiigjhkwetwnwwwjsahafajhwfohofoehaoowofoeoicioeciaqidjFaerlaeaffjgjlje XGRSXSsfdsmfjjjsomuchrandomstuffsomuchegjwogpjwd bldklhjitslikeyouthoughttheearliermovieswereeconfusinghahahah mfjff7ga98fhfhfplwxczchowarekidssupposedtounderstandanyofthisVSSH gmnskglactuallyhowareadultssupposedtounderstandanyofthisjskjjlvr lmnkrjsljrjsaywhatyouwillbutonceuponatimejsogrjdvpvarivpaeimp grfggjsfsfpoemichaelbayc”

Original black leather bolero-style women’s bomber jacket with short shawl lapel and hook and eye front closure. The entire jacket has been expertly studded with steel points, round stars and spikes with stud-formed symbols including spades with the number 13, crosses and diamond panels. Created by costume designer Marilyn Vance and hundreds of hours of single-studding to realize the designs’ special symbols representing luck and superstition.

With draped link chains on the back of the jacket. Interior lined with black satin. Highly visible in the beloved coming of age, Sci-Fi comedy when dream girl brought to life., “Lisa” (LeBrock) teaches the boys, “Gary” and “Wyatt” (Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) how to be “party animals”. The only one of these jackets produced due to limited time and extreme expense. In production used fine condition. Comes with an LOA from designer Marilyn Vance.

Brandon Vezmar is suing his date for $17.31, the price of the movie ticket he bought her. Vezmar claims the woman’s behaviour on their night out “is a threat to civilized society”.

Vezmar, 37, of Austin, Texas, is unhappy that whilst on a date at Barton Creek Square cinema, the woman, 35, became disinterested in the 3D showing of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 and began texting.

He talks to the American-Statesman. “It was kind of a first date from hell,” he says. About 15 minutes into the movie she took out her phone and texted. “This is like one of my biggest pet peeves,” he adds. In his small claim’s law suit Vezmar claims the woman “activated her phone at least 10-20 times in 15 minutes to read and send text messages”. This, he states, was a “direct violation” of the cinema’s policy on mobile phone use.

He says he asked her to stop. She refused. He invited her to text outside, which she did. She left and never returned. She took off in the car she and Vezmar had shared to reach the cinema, leaving him to make his own way home.

“I had my phone low and I wasn’t bothering anybody,” she says. “It wasn’t like constant texting. I’m not a bad woman. I just went out on a date.”

This being America, the woman says “she planned to file a protective order against Vezmar for contacting her little sister to get the money for the movie ticket”.

Acting. Isn’t that about pretending to be someone you are not? One writer takes issue with indie movie Anything, staring Matt Bomer:

However, it is not Bomer’s incontestable conventional attractiveness that is setting off alarm bells. It is his off-screen gender and the consistent issue of cis performers playing people of trans experience in film.

Recent years have seen both Jared Leto and Eddie Redmanye win Oscars for their respective trans-woman roles in “The Dallas Buyers Club” and “The Danish Girl”. Chloë Sevigny, Felicity Huffman, Elle Fanning and other notable cis-gender actors have taken on parts that show trans people either during or mid transition. Almost all of these actors have collected praise from the mainstream press for doing so.

Lauding cis actors for delving into trans experiences has long been a Hollywood tradition. The frequency of those plaudits has only more regular more and more films take up the trans narrative at different angles.

“I feel like one thing I encounter is that, particularly with cis men, when they find out I’m non-binary, they don’t know how to be in relation to someone that isn’t something that they understand,”

The paper adds:

And yet, even as more trans stories surface across all media, actual trans actors are often shut out of telling stories that are — in many senses — theirs to tell. It’s a trend that’s been a regular source of criticism and genuine concern.

When Miley Cyrus talked about being gender fluid in 2015, some dismissed it as yet another Hollywood wild-child phase. But Cyrus is hardly alone in identifying this way, joining the likes of teen activist Amandla Stenberg, the Transparent director Jill Soloway, and the model/actor Ruby Rose, who also stars in Orange Is the New Black. The number of gender nonconforming people in the UK is growing and almost half (44%) of a poll by the Fawcett Society last year said they regard gender as more fluid than simply man or woman. Taking their cues from the real-world social discourse, Facebook and Tinder now offer dozens of gender identities.

For those still confused, this is how Dillon put it on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in March: “Sex is between our legs, gender identity is between our ears.”

Today’s mash-up has been created by Palette-Swap Ninja. They’ve combined Star Wars and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Each song corresponds with a scene from the film:

Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)
Luke Is In The Desert (Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds)
Being From The Spaceport Of Mos Eisley (Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!)

The movement towards creating explicit codes of behaviour for every aspect of life – especially the messy bits about sex – welcomes the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which is now using the ‘F-rating’ to signal films of a feminist type. This is “so [viewers can choose films that fairly represent women on screen and behind the camera.” It is “applied to all films which are directed by women and/or written by women and/or have significant women on screen.”

That part about ‘significant women’ opens up a few issues, not least of all when it comes to grot movies, especially the girl-on-girl sort. The F-rating might not be the best guide to family entertainment or indeed anything approaching entertainment of any strain. But, then, the F-rating is not about films; it’s about educating the masses and turning people – wonderfully complex humans – into quotas. The official F-rated website explains the vision:

‘The stories we see on screen need to be told by a broad spectrum of people to represent our diverse culture. Without change, we will train the next generation to only recognise white males as the protagonists and the ones in control of the cameras, scripts and budgets. As well as equality on screen and behind the camera, more female film critics from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities need to be welcomed into the industry so that opinion and feedback is balanced.’

It’s certainly not about viewers, many of whom are women. It’s about gender. The thinking is that female film fans go to the cinema not to seek escapism but to reaffirm their identity. You’re not watching them; you’re looking at yourself. But you’ve already got free use of Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook to gawp at idealised filmic versions of yourself, so why spend good money on watching a narcissistic film?

Note 1: If equality is the mantra, then the IMDb could look at itself. According to Wikipedia, the IMDb ‘originated with a Usenet posting by British film fan and computer programmer Col Needham entitled “Those Eyes”, about actresses with beautiful eyes.’ Col is a white male – and since he flogged the site to Amazon, a very rich one.

Note 2: Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, a rich white male. Amazon Inc. has 7 ‘Officers’. All are white. One is a woman. Amazon has 11 directors – 9 of whom are male. Should businesses get an F-rating, too – and if so would the IMDb warrant one?